Mission

To Get Serious for a brief moment let’s talk about:

Patterns, Principles, Paradigms and the Art of Science

Science is the product of the historical collective of observations and discoveries which have come to shape our worldview. To fully understand what science is, we must look inside this collective history to find the individual stories of the people, places and things that went into building this history.

When we do, we find that these, like all stories, contain a beginning, middle and an end, or Narrative Arc. For example, as the above title suggests someone first noticed the “pattern” of, say, the daily rising and setting of the sun. He or she then formed an idea about how this rising and setting worked, thus creating a theory or “principle” governing its action.

Finally, they created a model of this phenomenon or “paradigm” to codify the movement of the sun as an event that represented a basic mechanism of the world. As I have found in the past, this approach, of leading students through the stories within and behind the “facts” of physics, biology, etc., has almost invariably resulted in their becoming irresistibly driven to explore the wider and greater depths of what science is and how they can make it their own. This site is committed to continuing and hopefully expanding the reach of this work.